They’re part of this year’s annual Frieze art fair, but don’t let the name fool you: The nearly two-dozen sculptures that touched down this week at Rockefeller Center are generating a lot of warmth.
Through June 28, they’re free for you to discover, scattered as they are indoors and out: in plazas and lobbies, sidewalks and by the skating rink, and even tucked inside the Channel Gardens.
Those gardens — that lushly flowered lane flowing from the rink eastward to Fifth Avenue — are now home to Kiki Smith’s “Rest Upon,” a bronze sculpture of a sleeping girl and a lamb.
A few hours before dawn on Thursday morning, Frieze curator Brett Littman watched a four-man crew lift it from its crate and gently set it down in a small alley before a bank of flowers.
“It was a magical moment,” Littman tells The Post. “When we placed it, even the riggers — really tough guys smoking cigarettes and chomping on cigars — they paused, looked at it and said, ‘Wow, this is beautiful!’ ”
It is. Finally! Every spring, it seems, some supersize sculpture like Jeff Koons’ kitschy, colossal “Puppy” gets plopped down in Rock Center. Here, courtesy of the Frieze, are smaller, more interesting works by artists from around the world, presented in a more intimate, accessible way.
Well, maybe too accessible: Two visiting sisters from Michigan this week ducked under a velvet rope to fist-bump Nick Cave’s “Untitled.”
“It looks like a spaceship with an arm coming out,” says 11-year-old Grace Kim, as her 16-year-old sister, Kate, shot video.
Older viewers will think that “spaceship” looks more like an old-timey gramophone horn, but who are we to say?
“I just gotta get these kids off that art!” says the grizzled Rock Center security guard, shooing a few off the base of Aaron Curry’s silvery, Calder-esque sculpture, which sits right in front of FAO Schwarz. (No wonder the kids were confused.)
Even the biggest sculpture — that elongated head covered by a pair of hands that rises nearly 30 feet off the ground, across from Saks Fifth Avenue — seems somehow accessible.
“Whatever it is, I like it,” says Viveth Forbes, a home-care aide from Long Island, as others around her snapped away with their phone cameras. “It’s beautiful!”
That’s the reaction artist Jaume Plensa, 64, hoped for when he created it, he tells The Post. “I try to embrace all the people walking in the street, who may not be interested in art, but for a few seconds are in front of something beautiful,” the Spanish artist says. Although he titled the work “Behind the Walls,” Plensa says he’s more interested in the personal than the political.
“Sometimes, our hands are the biggest walls,” he says. “They can cover our eyes, and we can blind ourselves to so much of what’s happening around us . . . To me, it’s an obsession to create a beautiful object with a message inside.”
Littman, who’s also director of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, says he wasn’t after any overarching message in picking works for the Frieze Sculpture exhibit. Nevertheless, a few themes pop up, civil rights among them.
You’ll see that in Paulo Nazareth’s billboard-height cutouts from a series titled “Blacks in the Pool,” now fronting 30 Rock. One, titled “Tommie,” shows a man with an upraised fist and a medal hanging around his neck.
“It’s a powerful image,” says James Vera, a law-firm clerk from The Bronx who recognized the figure as Tommie Smith, who gave the black-power salute, along with bronze medalist John Carlos, after winning gold at the 200-meter sprint in 1968’s Mexico City Summer Olympics.
But Vera, a longtime viewer of the History Channel, wasn’t sure what to make of the other cutout. Titled “Ruby,” it features a man standing beside a little girl, his hand on her shoulder.
“The way he’s holding her kind of reminds me of Joe Biden,” he muses.
In fact, Littman says, “Ruby” is Ruby Bridges, who in 1960 became the first African-American to integrate a school in Louisiana. She was escorted by a federal marshal — the other figure in the cutout — to do it.
Littman says that when he posted that image on Instagram, he heard from Bridges herself. “She saw it and sent me a message that she was so moved by it,” he says of the lifelong activist, now 64. “That blew my mind.”
It’s hard to say what Jose Dávila had in mind when he made “Joint Effort,” a rock sandwiched between two white columns cinched together with a red belt-like contraption and standing, for now, in front of Rock Center’s J.Crew.
That didn’t stop Brooklyn’s Julissa Rodriguez from trying to figure it out. “I feel like it’s about trying to juggle different things and you’re feeling overwhelmed,” the 21-year-old says.
And what to make of Joan Miró’s “Porte II”? That piece is the size of a phone booth, its two open sides revealing a dangling, rusty chain. That late, great artist made it in 1974 — decades before “Game of Thrones,” where it could fit right in.
Art: Make of it what you will. Download a map at RockefellerCenter.com and see for yourself.
